


your face is cool and calm but your hair is wrecked and wild

by Lilaciliraya



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Agent As Unsub, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Lies, Mental Instability, Minor Original Character(s), Murder, Non-Graphic Violence, POV Second Person, POV Spencer Reid, Secrets, Spencer Reid as Unsub, Suicidal Thoughts, Unreliable Narrator, brief mentions of the bad stuff, i guess, i mean it's criminal minds, kind of?, not Spencer, people die, spencer goes a little off the rails, spencer hates coffee, the little liar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-15 20:59:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16071239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilaciliraya/pseuds/Lilaciliraya
Summary: You’re high- the first time. Then you go back to work like nothing happened.Somehow it feels cleaner, this way, than when you used to get there after.You tell Hotch you were seeing a movie instead ofwashing your hands washing your hands washing your handsand letting the red run down the drain. You have a little glass vial in your bag when you say it, too.They stare and stare and stare straight through you but all they see is someone else.





	your face is cool and calm but your hair is wrecked and wild

**Author's Note:**

> hey im back to second person apparently. prepare yourself for excessive use of the word 'angry' because... i was angry. don't worry, though, i killed zero (0) people! (unlike spencer, sorry)

You are angry.

 

You are sick of this. 

 

There’s a hardness pulling at your jaw and the corners of your eyebrows and you don’t want to look like this heat that is churning in your lungs but you can hardly contain it from spilling out over your face. You don’t know what exactly has come over you but the one thing you recognize is the anger. You realize that you’ve never truly allowed yourself to feel it before because this is something completely new but you know, you finally get what people mean when they say they  _ just know  _ because- this is anger. You can feel it. 

 

You can’t stop thinking about Georgia. Everyone around you is telling you- as if you can’t figure it out for yourself- they say it’s okay for you to be affected by this. They don’t  _ say  _ it, but they know what they’re saying. They’re all profiliers. 

 

Because those are the only people you talk to- everyone around you, they’re all profilers. Because you have nothing else. You have no one else. But you do have this anger. And you won’t let them take it from you. 

 

They tell you- not with their words- that you did the right thing. That you saved yourself. That it was okay to pull out a gun and shoot another person and take their life like you deserved it. Somehow that’s  _ okay _ . 

 

There is this ice cold indifference curling around your shaking limbs- they hunt monsters, that’s what they call them- the other people who take lives away. When you do it, somehow, it’s okay. 

 

And when they do it, too, it’s for the greater good. 

 

Nothing means anything anymore.

 

The world is covered in these spray painted lines. It isn’t their place to put them there, is it? To decide where they belong.

 

You feel a scream raking its glass nails up your throat but you won’t let it out. You don’t want to. And you guess if profilers get to draw their lines wherever they choose then you’re free to vandalize your own property. 

 

Day after day, you watch this long parade of sad and broken people being put down in the streets, innocent bodies turned into filth, laid out on the ground like they meant nothing, like none of it matters. Everybody’s drawing their lines. 

 

But how can that be stopped? They’re just adding to the chaos. They can’t change anything.

 

You can’t change anything. 

 

You shot Tobias to ‘save yourself’ so it’s  _ okay _ . The jagged lines and mud and the thorns inside of normal people- you can’t help that. You can’t save anyone. Not even if you get there first. 

 

What’s the point in rushing to the scene to try to save these people who were pushed and pushed until there was nothing left? You hate it. How this all works. 

 

Sprawled across your couch in the empty, aching silence of your apartment all you feel is this bottomless frustration and your head is throbbing and you just want to push drugs into your system to feel that nothingness that felt like  _ something  _ instead of what it was. You know there’s no point to it, that it doesn’t help. But what does? What does? You don’t know anymore. You don’t know if it even matters. 

 

The lies feel better. All you want is to feel something better than this and- would it really hurt anyone to sidestep the truth for once? Your team can’t solve anything. You want to let the anger in. You want to push it out and let it seep into the void around you. You want to remember him, Tobias.

 

Your team can’t save anyone, just like they couldn’t save you. In that cabin, all you wanted was for someone to save you. But nobody ever helps and they just keep tearing other people apart and breaking people down until they snap. And you tried to save yourself but all you did was  _ hurt hurt hurt _ . 

 

This is how it is: you shot Tobias, the only one that tried to get you out of the nightmare, the only one that understood how it felt to be beaten down and re-molded into something you never wanted to be, the original victim of it all, and- and nobody cared. They let you walk away from Tobias's vacant eyes like he meant nothing. 

 

You wish he meant something. You’re so angry that you don’t know what to do with it all. 

 

Is it truly the worst possible outcome for someone to die while others still care? 

 

You’re used to the families sobbing in police stations all over the country, mourning their loved ones that were taken away from them too soon and it’s horrible, it really is. But- it felt more like a tragedy somehow to walk away after looking in Tobias’s eyes and seeing how he was happier in death, knowing that nobody would cry over the end of a damaged man. Why couldn’t you save  _ him _ ?

 

Why didn’t you even have to try? 

 

You knew- that night- you knew that nobody would run after you and scream, “Murderer! You killed him! How could you kill him?” Nobody would blame you. 

 

Just because Tobias was on the wrong side of some haphazardly drawn line that would wash away under a bit of carefully applied force. 

 

You are angry.

 

So you look at the vials on the coffee table in front of you that were supposed to be a  _ symbol _ , and instead of swallowing the painful lump in your throat like some kind of twisted lesson you pick them up and slip them into your pocket. And then you push yourself up off of our couch and find you keys, slip on your shoes, and start walking. 

 

You buy a syringe. Every person you see on the walk back feels less and less real, and by the time you’re back in the safety of your apartment you don’t even hesitate-

 

Your whole body ignites in artificial bliss and everything stops and you don’t care anymore and it feels like freedom.

 

You lay back and you don’t think and anything anymore and you don’t bother remembering the cabin or the bare light bulb above your head or walking away from a human being dead by your own hand, limp on a bed of dead leaves in a pool of his own blood. You don’t think; you feel.

 

Oblivion.

 

\--

 

It comes back, though. Of course it comes back. Your moods are swinging all over the place and you’re still angry and sometimes you can’t fight away the sick injustice of it all- nobody will care when you die either way. Why do you have to fight it?

 

Every day you have to fight through the way people treat you as  _ less than. _ As they tell you gently that your feelings are wrong and that you shouldn’t be guilty and that Tobias had it coming. That you’re overreacting, that you can’t save them all, that nothing makes what these unsubs are doing  _ okay _ even as they contradict themselves by turning around and reassuring him that what you did was.

 

As they turn around and treat other people the same way, and when they run into the unsubs that have been crushed under other people that look just like them they have the nerve to be disgusted by them. And then they have no choice but to take them out- these people that were only trying to save themselves- they have no choice, that’s what they tell themselves. It’s never their fault.

 

And it isn’t really. But nobody is even  _ trying _ to save them; nobody has ever tried to save them.

 

And you can’t take it anymore. 

 

It’s this horrifying cycle and you have to watch it happen over and over. Why should you save everybody else from the twisted pieces inside of you when nobody else does any saving at all? You can’t- you’re angry. That’s what you know.

 

The closest that people can get to being rescued is dying before they end up the monster, is dying while people care so that their life still means something, that their absence means something, isn’t it? It has to be; you’re driving yourself crazy. You can feel it bubbling inside of you, something burnt and deformed and  _ wrongwrongwrong _ . 

 

You could do it.

 

You’re already a tragedy. Nobody will mourn your death if you die a victim just like nobody would mourn the death of a monster, so what does it matter?

 

You want to save them all.

 

\--

 

You’re high- the first time. Then you go back to work like nothing happened. 

 

Somehow it feels cleaner, this way, than when you used to get there after.

 

\--

 

You hate how they look at you, like they pity you. It makes you sick. Maybe if they’d pitied you earlier it would have meant something, would have helped; you wouldn’t have minded if it had saved you from this. But now it makes you angry, everything about them makes you angry. They’re always looking down on you.

 

You aren’t going to play the victim any longer. You’re fighting back now, even if you’re on the other team, the other side of a crooked paint line on the concrete. They can look down on you all they want but you won’t take it. ‘Oh, poor Spencer, the world chewed him up and spit him out. Oh, Spence, he’s still so good inside, you know? There’s something in his core that makes him love so much even though he’s seen the worst the world has to offer.’

 

Why should you have to be that man? That doesn’t make it right. 

 

You aren’t that man. Not anymore.

 

They can pity you, they can watch you fall apart and think you’ll pull yourself together on your own just for them, they can sit back and put their trust in  _ justice _ . You’ll let them believe you’re the type of strong and resilient that they want, the obedient civil servant, the little computer on legs that agrees with all of their pretty little two dimensional lines. You know the type of strong you want to be. 

 

You can save them all. 

 

Just not the way they want you to. 

 

You see her on the news later- of course she makes it on the news. Marietta Ann. She was a sweet girl, a beautiful girl; she was really going places. It’s a tragic loss, they say. 

 

That’s how you know you’re doing the right thing.

 

(Marietta Ann had a neighbor across the street that liked to watch too close. 

 

He had her tend his flowers and come inside for lemonade after she was done. Marietta Ann had an old, lonely neighbor and purple bruises on the insides of her thighs underneath her pretty pink dresses. 

 

Marietta Ann was top of her 5th grade class, and the other kids didn’t like that. 

 

They were all planting something rotten inside of her. It wouldn’t have been a  _ tragedy _ , if you’d waited any longer.)

 

\--

 

You tell Hotch you were seeing a  _ movie _ instead of  _ washing your hands washing your hands washing your hands _ and letting the red run down the drain. You have a little glass vial in your bag when you say it, too. 

 

You’ll play along but if they catch you you know that you can run faster.

 

\--

 

The team takes a case in New Jersey and you see a boy with ragged clothes and a black eye, angry flared nostrils and clenched fists, see his father grab his shoulder and  _ pull  _ like he’s dragging a bin to the curb. 

 

They’re chasing a killer so you don’t say anything, don’t have the time, but you watch long enough to see the father dump his son in a car and drive away; you see the license plate for just a second before it gets lost in traffic, but a second is long enough for you. 

 

You go back. Justin Murphy does not make it on the news, he gets a single paragraph in the school paper. His father doesn’t cry, his friends don’t attend his funeral; he doesn’t even have a service. You mourn him alone because there’s no one else to do it.

 

_ You were too late. _

 

All you think about for days is the look in Tobias’s eyes when he saw the bruises on your body, the acceptance of his father’s rage. ‘Oh, he hurt you too? There’s no way to escape it- except, here, this is the only thing that helps-’

 

You tie off your own tourniquet this time, and you close your eyes so you don’t have to remember the way that Tobias’s gazed lifelessly into the night sky.

 

You walk away again; you failed.

 

\--

 

Jason Andrews- he likes to skin rabbits in his backyard while his parents are out, likes to pretend that he’s had girls over instead like any normal boy. He seems so normal.

 

But you know the truth. Jason Andrews is too empty inside, too cold. If his parents found out they wouldn’t buy him video games and hug him goodnight. Nobody can find out. Jason, though, the thing is- he’s like a drug addict. He can’t stop himself and every time he needs a fix he’ll need a little  _ more _ . So there’s only one way to save him.

 

You don’t shoot up after this boy; you’re riding the high for days, your heart ready to burst out of his chest in joy because  _ you did it _ . You saved him. 

 

And they cried and cried and cried over Jason like he was important, like he mattered just as much as everyone else and now nobody will ever have to know. You see Tobias in your dreams and he just smiles- a soft, bittersweet smile just for you, just for understanding.

 

“Thank you,” you imagine hearing when you wake up, eyes still shut tight, trying to hold on to the fantasy world, “Thank you for saving them, Spencer.” 

 

You smile back into your empty apartment. 

 

\--

 

Emily tries to talk to you. She ambushes you while you’re starting a new pot of coffee. You don’t know why they send Emily, why they thought that was a good idea.

 

“Reid,” she starts, her voice all concerned like she cares. You don’t turn or otherwise acknowledge her at all. “Look, I know we haven’t been on the best terms lately, but this team cares about you, really.” You want to laugh but you don’t want to bring more attention to all the ways you’ve changed so you take a deep breath and count to ten, slowly.

 

“I’m fine, Prentiss. They worry because they think I can’t handle this,” you free your hands before turning around.  “They think I’m a kid but I’m not, okay? I’m an agent just like all of you and I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing it for a long time.”

 

“We don’t think you’re a kid, Reid, but what happened was-”

 

“It was the job, Emily, and I’m fine.”

 

She looks at you for a while. “Okay,” and that’s that. “But if you need anything-” she nods one last time.

 

You’re fine. 

 

She watches you all day, though, and you finish your paperwork as fast as you can because that’s what the old Spencer would do.

 

(You overhear her talking to Morgan later, asking him to talk to you. “He said he’s fine. I don’t know why I expected anything else, but he does seem fine. He’s acting too normal. All of that-” he can almost see the way she must be waving her hands, “and he’s just ‘fine’?” 

 

“I know. He wants us to think he’s alright because something is really wrong.”

 

“There’s something he isn’t telling us.”

 

“We have to wait until he comes to us. He’ll talk to someone eventually.”

 

“I don’t think so. This time… I don’t think he will.”

 

You walk in to stop the conversation before they decide to stage an intervention for you. You make sure to make a lot of noise on your way.

 

“Reid!”

 

“More coffee? The four cups you had weren’t enough?” Morgan laughs at his own joke but it’s too forced.)

 

\--

 

The thing is: you hate coffee. You can’t stand the bitterness- that’s why you pour sugar in like it’s the main event; you have to mask the taste. They never ask why you bother. A room full of profilers and you’re just the joke. 

 

They don’t question you because they don’t respect you, they don’t think you could manage to lie to them, don’t think there’s anything beneath the surface that they can’t handle. 

 

You drink it often, and you’ll take the secret to your grave, but it’s the truth. You like holding the cup in your hands, ducking your head to take a drink, having something physical between yourself and the rest of the world. 

 

You don’t like coffee. But you spent most of your life in academia and it’s expected.

 

You like having the cup to fall back on and so you make sure to carry one as much as you can get away with. You’ve built up this reputation and that’s fine but, sometimes, you wish they’d realize and stop talking about it in front of you. 

 

This whole room full of profilers and- you’d think one of them would figure it out. 

 

You’re grateful for the reputation, though, because when you come in to work in the mornings exhausted with a headache and a bad attitude they joke that you haven't had your caffeine fix yet. They don’t suspect that you spent the night shooting up.

 

They don’t know anything about you. It’s for the best.

 

You figure out how much you can take to avoid the worst of withdrawal if you get stuck on a case and can’t risk using, how much you can take and still be able to function if you’re called in at odd hours. 

 

You learn how to hide it.

 

(It’s so easy it hurts.)

 

\--

 

Jonathan Reuter fits the victimology for their next case. There’s a serial killer running around killing boys between the ages of 14 and 16 with blonde hair and blue eyes and Jonathan fits the description perfectly.

 

You know the unsub didn’t kill him because you spent the night washing his blood off of a knife after you used it to slit his throat- quick and painless.

 

What are you supposed to say, though? So you skew the geographic profile because you don’t have any reason to exclude him from it. The unsub goes down in a rain of bullets with a gun to  another boy’s head anyway, and nobody is ever the wiser. 

 

The families all mourn and mourn and mourn. 

 

(Jonathan liked to party. He liked to join the college kids and drink all night; he liked to bring pretty girls drinks and wait for their eyes to glaze over before he took them upstairs and locked the door.

 

He liked to pretend that it was okay because his father used to do it, too, when Jonathan was younger. But his father wouldn’t drug them first and little Jonathan had to listen to them scream from his room at night.

 

He used to cry about it, but nobody cared so he learned not to care, either.

 

He didn’t feel anything at all when he hurt them.

 

You know how boys like that end up.)

 

\--

 

You see her on the way home at night. You’d just gotten back from a bad case and there she is, a block away from your apartment sitting in an alley talking to herself and you can tell- you recognize it; you’d recognize the signs anywhere.

 

And you feel this itch underneath your skin but you don’t want to. You think of your mother and how she’s the best person you know- she is. Mental illness doesn’t make someone a criminal; you  _ know _ that.

 

You think of yourself- you’re saving them. You’re saving them. You aren’t crazy.

 

You’re lonely. You’re so so lonely and you tell yourself that  _ you’re fine you’re fine you’re fine _ but your chest aches and your feet move without your permission and you’re sitting next to her. You talk to her. You want to tell her- about how you’re helping them, you  _ are _ , how you aren’t crazy.

 

You just want to talk.

 

You kill her. No plan, no precautions, she’s dead just like that.

 

You don’t think that anyone will even look for her and you feel sick. Your hands are shaking and your legs don’t work right as you try to coordinate them to carry yourself up the steps to your apartment. You killed her. 

 

You don’t know why. 

 

(Now you’ll remember her and how she listened, even if nobody else ever does.)

 

As soon as you get inside you lock your door and the deadbolt, too, and you rush to the bathroom and vomit like you have something more than hydrochloric acid in your system. You’re fine you’re fine you’re fine. You’re saving them and you aren’t crazy and you want to call your mom but you can’t face her because-  _ what have you done _ ? You can’t suck in a breath. 

 

The vial clangs against the tile floor as you fumble it out of your pocket, one hand reaching for a syringe. You search for a vein without tying off your arm because you don’t think you’ll make it that long before your head explodes from the lack of oxygen and then you  _ push _ -

 

You don’t even know how much you measured out but it’s too much. 

 

(It isn’t enough.)

 

You sit there all night, crying silently on the floor of your bathroom under the harsh lights. Your skin looks too pale for you to be living- are you? You feel sick. And then your alarm sounds all too soon and you have to heave your body up off the floor but your legs barely support you and you aren’t sure if you can do this. 

 

You do it anyway. 

 

(“Long night, Pretty Boy?”

 

“Something like that.”

 

They all stare and stare and stare straight through you but all they see is someone else.)

 

\--

 

You can hardly stand living inside your own skin. No matter how much dilaudid you force into your veins it doesn’t go away; there’s no physical cause but there has to be because  _ you aren’t crazy _ . You're not. 

 

Why is that always the worst case scenario? You love your mother. You do. 

 

But- they’re always on the wrong side of the lines. The ‘crazy’ ones. The hurt ones. The mentally ill. They’re always suspects.

 

When you think about what you’ve been doing your whole body ignites in protest. You don’t know what to tell yourself to feel alright again; you don’t know if you can ever feel okay again. You have all of these secrets now that you have to keep and your body feels so full of them you think you might burst but you  _ can’t, _ not anymore, not when your secrets are so  _ dark dark dark. _

 

There is a parade of ghosts at your back, always watching. 

 

And anytime you try to understand your head goes all light and dizzy and you feel like laughing because it’s so twisted up and  _ wrong _ . Sometimes you lie on your floor and stare at the ceiling until your eyes go blurry with tears and you can’t remember why you’re crying but know you always do.

 

There’s something sick inside of you and you don’t want it there anymore.

 

But you’re stuck.

 

You carry your knife around now-  _ the _ knife- even though you know it’s a risk you shouldn’t take. You keep it nearby just in case you muster up the courage to kill one last time- someone who deserves it, finally. Someone who has caused destruction and chaos and pain and  _ death _ , unnecessary death. Someone whose time has come.

 

When you look in the mirror all you see is flesh and bone. Sometimes you swear it isn’t even yours. You think you see Tobias, just out of the corner of your eye, but every time you turn to face him all you see is your own sallow skin. 

 

When you think about Tobias now you think about how you ruined him and you aren’t sorry. You wish you could do it again, that you could rip your knife across his chest again and again as the life slowly seeped out of him. You don’t think about it a lot, but when you do your stomach turns from the pictures that won’t leave your head.

 

This is who you are, somehow. You don’t know how it happened but you know that there is no going back. 

 

And one day you manage to pull the knife out of your bag while standing in front of the mirror in the restroom in the middle of the BAU- and you don’t lock the door- but you hold it to your neck and imagine what you could do. And you watch over the reflection of your shoulder and wait, but nobody comes and you wonder for a minute if they know and they’re letting you do this for their own good. 

 

But then you hear the heavy sound of Morgan’s footsteps and you jerk your hand down just in case. In case you’re right and they wouldn’t try to stop you. Because you don’t want to know for sure. 

 

You shove the blade in your bag and start washing your hands right as the door swings open. One of these days you aren’t going to hesitate so long, you can feel it. 

 

(“Hey kid, you feeling alright?” 

 

“I’m fine, Morgan.”

 

“Really? Because there’s blood on your neck. What’s going on with you? 

 

Your hands must have been shaking hard enough to break skin. “I- uh- yeah I must have cut myself while shaving this morning.” You grab a paper towel and press it to your skin, walk out the door without looking back.)

**Author's Note:**

> i wasn't sure if i liked the ending so i just kind of.. stopped it here.


End file.
